Forbes ranks Francis as 4th most powerful person in the world

Pope Francis is ranked ‘the 4th most powerful’ person in the world after Presidents Putin (Russia), Obama (USA), and Xi Jinping (China), by Forbes, the prestigious US business magazine

gerard o'connellROME

Pope Francis is the 4th ‘most powerful’ person in the world according to Forbes, the prestigious American business magazine, which has just released the names of those it ranks as ‘the 72 most powerful people’ on planet earth in 2013.

Forbes ranks him immediately after the Presidents of Russia, the USA and China. It is a most extraordinary result for this humble leader of the Catholic Church who has never in his life sought position, power or status, has always lived as a poor man and, until his election as Pope used public transport, shuns mundane events and gives priority attention to the world’s poor.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was given the number 1 position in the Forbes list, followed by US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, in the number 2 and 3 slots respectively. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel came in at Number 5, and is rated as the most powerful woman in the world.

Each year Forbes provides a ranking of the heads of state, financiers, philanthropists and entrepreneurs “who truly run the world”. It lists one for every 100 million of the world’s inhabitants, and since there are today 7.2 billion people on earth today, it has come up with what it considers the 72 ‘most powerful’ among them.

Unlike Pope Francis who considers “power as service”, Forbes uses far different criteria to define ‘power’. It outlines these criteria in an article published on-line October 30, in which it announced the 72 names. It explains that its editors measure ‘power’ along ‘four dimensions’. First, they evaluate “whether the candidate has power over lots of people”. Next they assess “the financial resources controlled by each person, and see if they are relatively large compared to their peers”. Then they determine “if the candidate is powerful in multiple spheres”, being powerful in just one area is often not enough. Lastly, “they make sure that the candidates actively use their power.”

To calculate the final rankings, Forbes’ editors rank all the candidates under consideration – hundreds of them- in each of those ‘four dimensions of power’, and then average the individual rankings into a composite score.